For North Carolinians, nothing evokes nostalgia for good times like the beach. Brunswick County is home to four popular beach destinations and to Calabash, a small town known (at least in North Carolina) as the seafood capital of the world.
March 16, 2024 – County #54 – Brunswick
Things that appear timeless and permanent allow the comforting illusion that there are things in this world we can absolutely count on. I remember being unsettled as a child by a book, Walter the Lazy Mouse, that told of a mouse so lazy that when his family moves away, he is forgotten and left behind. The pictures of poor Walter walking through his empty home, searching for his family and slowly coming to the realization that he’s been abandoned, are still vivid in my mind from the first time I saw them more than 60 years ago.
I experienced that same sense of uneasiness when I first learned that Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem was originally a college in the small town of Wake Forest but was lured to Winston-Salem in the 1950s by the promise of money from Winston-Salem’s prominent and wealthy Reynolds family. If there was anything I thought I could count on growing up in the college town of Chapel Hill, it was the presence of the university. Stately trees, ivy-covered old buildings, stories that were passed from generation to generation – everything about the place seemed deeply-rooted and immovable. The lesson from Wake Forest, that a whole institution could be gone from a town in a flash, left me feeling like Walter the lazy mouse, discovering that the world could change in an instant.
On a beautiful day in October, I made my first trip to the campus of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem. Although it was the middle of a weekday, the pristine campus was eerily quiet with few students or other people in sight. I felt like I was on an empty movie set.
I came upon an archway that commemorates another archway on Wake’s original campus in the town of Wake Forest. I was glad to see this acknowledgement that the school originated somewhere else. Still, I was unable to shake the disconcerting sense of unreality that seemed to permeate the picture-perfect scene, probably colored by my bias that this institution was not where it originally set out to be.
October 9, 2023 – County #53 – Forsyth
With its deep, clear water and stunning mountain views, Lake Lure has long been a popular vacation destination for North Carolinians, especially those in the Charlotte area. Many people also know Lake Lure as the site of the beloved 1987 movie, Dirty Dancing. The year before Dirty Dancing was released, it was another film that brought Lake Lure to my attention. Early scenes from one of my favorite documentaries, Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March, were shot at his family’s vacation home on Lake Lure.
It’s taken 37 years to make my way there but, with my sister Pam, I set out for Lake Lure on a beautiful Sunday in May, meandering along the back roads that I prefer. We packed our lunches and I held out the somewhat unrealistic hope of a picturesque picnic spot where we could stop and eat. That vision was realized when we came upon Richfield Park, a tranquil area that included picnic shelters alongside a fishing pond. It was an appreciated and impressive surprise for a town with a population of less than 600 people and a welcome introduction to Stanly County.
Leaving Stanly County and skirting past Charlotte, the road wound its way up to The 1927 Lake Lure Inn and Spa, looking out over the lake and nearby mountains. The highlight of our stay in Lake Lure was our visit to The Flowering Bridge, a historic bridge that was decommissioned in 2011 and then transformed into a community garden by local volunteers, a real testament to what can be accomplished when dedicated people come together.
From Lake Lure, we crossed the border into Tennessee for a reunion with our first cousins, Mary Ann and Shatzie. We had so much fun reconnecting and finding common bonds, including an agreement that no matter what the calendar or the mirror says, we are all young at heart!
Next on our itinerary was a stay in the small and charming mountain town of Burnsville, where the Carolina Country lnn was a nostalgic reminder of our childhood vacations. A practically ideal coffee shop, Appalachian Java, set us up nicely for an excursion to the top of nearby Mt. Mitchell, the tallest mountain east of the Mississippi. UNC professor Elisha Mitchell lost his life on this mountain attempting to verify its height, so it only seemed right for two UNC grads to go to the mountaintop and pay homage to his efforts.
There is so much negativity in our world and plenty of reason for anxiety. Stepping outside of our routine was a much-needed chance for Pam and me to remind ourselves of the good and beauty all around us. From a community park that provides a respite for people in Stanly County, a bridge in Rutherford County that was reconstituted into a garden full of surprises, a reunion that rekindled family bonds, and a view in Yancey County from our tallest mountain, we found a world full of reasons to celebrate.
May 7th – 9th, 2023 – Counties #50, 51, and 52 – Stanly, Rutherford, Yancey
My understanding of Scottish history is pretty much limited to what I’ve learned from reading the epic time-travel romance series, Outlander, which is to say there are probably plenty of gaps in my knowledge. I do know enough though to understand that when North Carolina’s colonial government in 1754 gave the name Cumberland to an area settled primarily by Scottish highlanders, in recognition of the man who had recently defeated the Scots at the Battle of Culloden, that was one intentionally snarky move! Apparently, there was an effort in 1784 to change the county’s name to Fayette County but nothing came of it and all these years later, our state is still honoring the Duke of Cumberland.
Cumberland County’s main claim to fame is as the home of Fort Bragg, which will become Fort Liberty on June 2, 2023. The name change doesn’t appear to be provoking much controversy, maybe because Braxton Bragg not only fought against the U.S. during the Civil War but is generally considered to have been an ineffective general as well.
When my daughter Katy and I explored Cumberland County on a pretty spring day, we weren’t focusing on name changes but simply looking for what the area had to offer. We were underwhelmed until we came upon revitalized Hay Street in the middle of downtown Fayetteville. Our spirits were lifted with a good cup of coffee from Rude Awakening Coffee Shop, time spent browsing in Reverie Goods and Gifts, and the discovery of street art in the form of woodpeckers. Woodpeckers because Cumberland County is home to the red-cockaded woodpecker, and endangered species that makes its home in long leaf pines and lends its name to Fayetteville’s baseball team. As long as we are considering changing names, I think that Woodpecker County has a nice ring to it.
May 28, 2022 – County #49 – Cumberland (for now)
True friends are one of life’s real treasures and my daughter Katy is lucky enough to have such a friend in her former colleague Courtney. Courtney herself is lucky enough to be raising her children in her hometown of New Bern, an idyllic river community in Craven County that could be straight out of a Nicholas Sparks novel. It’s a place where you can sit in your backyard taking in a view of the Trent River, a place where water play is part of kids’ daily routines, and a place where there’s no better way to get to the country club than by hopping on the back of a boat. No wonder New Bern is reminiscent of a Nicholas Sparks novel – Courtney pointed out the author’s house to us as her husband steered us down the river and we took in the sights and sounds of a lazy summer day on the Trent with friends.
July 25, 2021, County #48 – Craven
When I heard that Catawba County, in Piedmont North Carolina, is home to one of two original covered bridges in North Carolina, I figured why not check it out! My right-brain self was not able to appreciate the unique lattice truss that went into the engineering of the bridge but Bunker Hill Bridge did make for a scenic photo op. After our less-than-thrilling bridge experience, my daughter Katy suggested we look for a nearby historic mill site she had read about. We found Murray’s Mill still operational and open for visitors along with a nearby general store, open since the 1890s, all in a tranquil setting that was worth the trip.
Katy and I left Catawba County and drove through Iredell on our way back home, stopping in Statesville for lunch. What a pleasant surprise Statesville turned out to be, a small town with a picturesque and thriving downtown! Even better, Statesville is the hometown of one of Katy’s fellow teachers and she and her son (one of Katy’s former students) joined us for a fun lunch at a restaurant, Groucho’s, with a sign over the door that made us feel right at home.
June 19, 2021, Counties #46 and #47 – Catawba and Iredell
North Carolina has a reputation for natural beauty that I expect is inspired by our mountains to the west and our beaches in the east. Between those iconic regions though, you find country roads rolling through gentle, green hills that have a loveliness all their own. As luck would have it, my route to Oxford and Henderson on a day in late September took me along just such a road. Putting worries about the pandemic and the upcoming election behind me, the peaceful drive provided solace for my soul, disturbed only by a peppering of Trump/Pence signs along the way.
My first destination was The Peanut Roaster in the Granville County community of Henderson. Upon arrival, I sent up a silent thanks for the light, sandy soil of eastern NC that yields delicious peanuts and helps make us the fifth largest peanut producing state in the US. The Peanut Roaster was the smallest store I had been in since the pandemic began and I was relieved to be its only customer. After friendly conversation with the store’s lone employee, I stocked up on a variety of peanuts, and headed to Oxford in nearby Vance County.
On College Street in Oxford, I found the graceful, two-story brick building that houses C.G. Credle Elementary School. The flag out front was at half mast in honor of Ruth Bader Ginsburg who had died four days earlier. Built in 1911, C.G. Credle has the distinction of being the oldest building operating continuously as a school in North Carolina. I also know it as the all-white school author Tim Tyson recalled attending in his memoir Blood Done Sign My Name. I remember Tyson’s story of the first two Black students to attend C.G. Credle in 1967 and, looking at the imposing structure, I couldn’t imagine the courage it took for those two elementary school students to walk up those steps the first time.
Much as we might try to wish our worries away, the world and its troubles are always with us. Try to put aside nervousness about the presidential election on a drive through remote country and Trump signs appear all along the way. The halls of a picturesque old school hold memories of bigotry and hate. And the half-mast schoolyard flag out front won’t let me forget that our Supreme Court is soon to see radical change. September is a beautiful month and it’s also a reminder that colder and darker days lie ahead. Even as I sought serenity on my September drive to Vance and Granville, reality was an inescapable part of my journey.
September 22, 2020, Counties #44 and #45 – Granville and Vance
Our destination on that late summer day was Jugtown, the area around Seagrove, NC that claims the largest number of working potters in the United States. Rebecca and I took a scenic route to Jugtown down backcountry roads, a little taken aback by the number of Trump/Pence signs we saw along the way, but enjoying the natural beauty all the same.
Once in Seagrove, we ate a picnic lunch, purchased pottery (of course!) and visited the North Carolina Pottery Center, a celebration of area potters which had just reopened after many months of closure. On the grounds of the center, we were thrilled to come across a mosaic sculpture created by the children of Moore, Chatham, and Randolph counties. The schoolchildren’s uplifting messages were a welcome sight for us and, we hoped, a sign of better times ahead.
September 5, 2020, County #43 – Randolph
The weather was bleak and the overcast sky fit my gloomy mood as I headed to Hoke County on a chilly Saturday in January. I was listening to the UNC/Pitt game on the car radio and the Tar Heels’ poor play certainly wasn’t lifting my spirits. Perhaps, given my state of mind, I shouldn’t have picked this particular day to travel to a somewhat forsaken place where a gruesome murder was committed years before. I’ve always had an interest in family dynamics gone awry though and from what I understood, things went terribly awry for the Cameron family of Hoke County on the night before Easter Sunday in 1944. I was on my way this particular Saturday to check out the scene of a sensational crime that surprisingly little is known about.
Leon Cameron was a married farmer with three children, living in the Timberland community just outside of Raeford, when he disappeared on that fateful spring day in 1944. Most accounts of Cameron describe his family as a prominent and respected one so I was surprised to discover that his father, John A. Cameron, was sentenced to life in prison in 1912 after gunning down Raeford’s police chief. After just a year in prison, John A. Cameron escaped and lived for the next fourteen years as a prosperous businessman in Alabama before finally turning himself in to Hoke County authorities. He was returned to prison briefly but soon released on parole amid rumors that he gave the murdered police chief’s family $10,000 to request clemency.
In the meantime, Cameron’s son Leon, just two years old at the time of the police chief’s murder, had grown up without a father (although there are stories that John A. Cameron returned periodically during Leon’s childhood, staying in a secret chamber in the family’s large, brick home on Raeford’s main street). By the time Leon’s father returned home for good, a free man, Leon was almost grown and would soon marry another Hoke County local, Winnie McNeill.
Like her new husband Leon, Winnie was no stranger to childhood trauma, having lost both of her parents by the time she was seven. Winnie and her two younger brothers were raised by her deceased mother’s unmarried siblings in Raeford. One of these uncles was an undertaker, a profession that Winnie’s brother Hector would take up as well when he reached adulthood.
Winnie and Leon had been married for more than a decade when Winnie reported her husband missing, stating he had left the house three weeks before and had not been seen since. At the time, Leon and Winnie had two daughters, ages 10 and 8, and a five-year-old son. After Leon’s disappearance, Winnie went on to raise their three children as a single mom. From outward appearances, the children thrived. Their son played varsity baseball and basketball at Hoke County High, where he was named “most attractive,” went on to graduate from UNC, and later to work at Price, Waterhouse in New Jersey. The younger of the two daughters married a local boy and remained in Hoke County while the oldest girl graduated from Women’s College in Greensboro, married, and became a reading instructor at a community college in Florida.
Decades later, Winnie and Leon’s oldest daughter shared with a therapist disturbing memories of events surrounding her father’s disappearance when she was ten years old. With the therapist’s encouragement, the daughter talked with the FBI and then with a hypnotist, recovering memories along the way. She remembered her mother cleaning bloody pots and pans in the kitchen and recalled peeking into a little-used room in the family home, only to see her father’s nearly-nude body on the floor, with blood-soaked gauze wrapped around his groin. She remembered hearing noises in the night and looking outside to see her mother and mother’s brother Hector (the undertaker) carrying a large box from the porch into the backyard. Most horrific was her memory of going to use the outhouse and seeing her father’s face looking up at her, floating in a pool of excrement.
The daughter was encouraged by the FBI to confront her mother, now 69 years old, and still living in the family farmhouse. When she telephoned Winnie on December 1, 1979 and asked, “is my father still in that toilet?” her mother’s polite and understated response was one with a familiar feel to every person raised by a Southern woman. “I’ll tell you where he is after Christmas.”
The FBI was unwilling to wait for Winnie and her daughter to have that conversation and took their evidence to Hoke County sheriff Dave Barrington who obtained a warrant to search the Cameron property. Both of the Cameron daughters accompanied the authorities to help direct them to the site of the old outhouse. Their mother was at home as the digging took place and even brought the workers cookies and lemonade. Before long, a rib was discovered and soon, more and more human bones that showed evidence of having been butchered. Found with the bones was part of a wallet and the framed photograph of a woman with the name “Kate McD. King” on the back.
Winnie’s son arrived from New Jersey two days after the excavation started and discovered both his mother and her pistol missing from the family home. He enlisted the help of a friend with a small private plane to fly over the family property until he spotted his mother’s car in a clearing at the rear of the family property. He drove to the area and found his mother dead, a gunshot wound to her chest, the pistol clutched in her hand, and in her car a sealed envelope addressed to “Dave,” the Hoke County sheriff. Sheriff Barrington, called to the scene, read the suicide note and announced it was Winnie’s confession to the murder of her husband, Leon Cameron. The sheriff never divulged the remaining contents of the note.
Because of the condition of Leon’s body as the daughter remembers seeing it, the general assumption is that the crime was of a sexual nature and that Winnie suspected Leon of a liaison with the woman in the picture who was identified by the sheriff as Kate McDiarmid King. Kate King was Winnie’s aunt, one of the McDiarmid siblings who helped raise her. At the time of Leon’s death, he and Winnie were both 34 and Kate McDiarmid King was 61, twenty-seven years Leon’s senior.
The month after Winnie’s suicide, her daughter approached authorities in Cumberland County, requesting a copy of the videotape of her hypnosis session, apparently hoping to use it to share her story with the public. The videotape however had been destroyed. In a cooperative endeavor, the district attorney of Cumberland and Hoke counties, Sheriff Barrington, and Barrington’s Cumberland County counterpart stomped on and smashed the tape and then burned it in one another’s presence. Afterwards, the district attorney declared there was “absolutely nothing on the tape from a prosecutor’s perspective to justify its retention. The case was interesting, but closed.” Understatement seems to be a theme in this neck of the woods!
What Winnie Cameron confessed to in her suicide note and what her daughter recalled in her hypnosis session was “interesting” enough that the authorities made sure it would never be revealed. As I drove through Hoke County on that Saturday in January, almost exactly 40 years after Leon Cameron’s bones were unearthed, it was easy to believe that this was a place that would give up its secrets reluctantly. The Camerons’ former farmhouse had an unwelcoming enough look that I chose to take a photograph of it through my car window rather than get out and walk around. Less than a mile from the family homestead, I drove past the pleasant brick home of the younger of the two Cameron sisters, now in her eighties, where a no-nonsense fence and gated driveway didn’t exactly shout “please drop on in.” I stopped by the office of the Hoke County Historical Society in Raeford but it was locked tight, although it is advertised to be open on Saturday afternoons. I chatted with another person who was waiting there in hopes of getting in to do some research, a Hoke County native who had lived there all his life. He had never heard of the murder of Leon Cameron.
Lee Smith’s wonderful 1985 novel, Family Linen, is loosely based on the macabre tale of Winnie and Leon Cameron and the 2020 Netflix series, Outer Banks, has a minor storyline that mirrors it as well. Apart from these fictional works, little has been written or told about the grisly murder of Leon Cameron. Any hopes I might have had of finding out more by driving to Hoke County came to naught. Whether it’s skeletons in the closet or bones beneath the outhouse, Hoke County appears to be a place that guards its secrets well, allowing them to remain buried and hidden for years or even into eternity.
January 18, 2020, County #42 – Hoke
Over the past 40 years, I’ve driven south down Highway 1 to Rockingham more times than I can count. The summer that my husband Ron and I were married, Ron’s mother Cumi moved from the North Carolina mountains where she was raised to the hot, flat sandhills area of our state and, ever since, our family life has been punctuated by trips to Rockingham.
In spite of our many visits there, all I really know of the town of Rockingham is contained within the walls of the low-slung brick ranch that Cumi and her husband Jimmy have called home for more than four decades. I know the smells of the kitchen and the feel of the comfortable plaid sofa in the den. I know the collection of miniature spoons hanging on the wall and the curtains drawn tight against the outdoor light. I know the warmth of the gas fireplace that used to hold logs and I know the bathroom where gold towels hang so neatly I’m afraid to touch them. I know the dishwasher that sits unused because it’s much more efficient and frugal to wash the dishes yourself. I know the collection of family photos that changes over the years but always includes the people Cumi loves most.
On the bright morning of Mother’s Day, 2019, Cumi slipped away at the age of 91, sitting in a recliner, holding Jimmy’s hand. A few days later Ron and our daughters and I found ourselves heading to Rockingham once again, this time to say a final good-bye to our mother, grandmother, and mother-in-law.
Cumi was a formidable person and in my early years of knowing her, I was a little afraid of her. Her strong will carried her from the mountain cabin where she was raised to the city life she dreamed of, in Asheville and in Detroit. When Ron’s dad died suddenly, Cumi carved a life for her son and herself out of nothing but determination and grit. She and her second husband Jimmy were married for 53 years and for most of that time, Cumi ran the show. It was only when dementia crept in that she relaxed the reins and allowed Jimmy to take charge, which he did with enormous patience and care.
Cumi kept the cleanest house I’ve ever seen, I’m pretty sure because even dirt was intimidated to cross her path. She fought diligently and successfully to keep her weight within 3 pounds of her ideal and took careful pride in her appearance. She loved to shop, especially for clothes, and she favored the color red. Cumi introduced me to delicacies like Watergate salad and Seven-Up pound cake and she made the world’s best cheese straws. She had a playful side that was especially apparent in her interactions with her son and her husband and her granddaughters, all of whom she loved to tease and be teased by. She played a mean game of bridge and pinochle. Her friends were friends for life. Without her, the three people I treasure most would not be a part of this world.
Cumi never wanted to move to Rockingham to start with but, as she became familiar with the town and its people, she came to feel at home there and to appreciate it. And as I came to know Cumi and to learn her ways, she became family to me and a person I grew to love. May you rest in peace, Cumi.
May 16, 2019, County #41 – Richmond
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